InCommons Collaboration Questions

From E-Democracy.org

Your Story

Describe your locally-based collaboration and the problem it sought to address:

60 words (480 characters).

The problem: Cars, television, air conditioning, two incomes needed to survive as a family, etc. have fundamentally eroded the opportunity for local public life and community strengthening neighborliness to simply exist much less thrive.

The collaborative solution: Create vibrant, effective, and shared very local neighborhood online public spaces that fundamentally sustainable and low cost. Build them with inclusive outreach to engage everyday people including those in high immigrant, lower income areas. Counter the virtual cross burning of our generation promoted anonymous local online news commenting by instead requiring real names, providing volunteer neighbor-based facilitiators, and promoting friendly and civil exchange.

The collaboration: Our five strongest and new neighbor-level online Issues Forum in Minneapolis including Cedar-Riverside, Powderhorn Park, Seward, and Standish Ericsson and Greater Frogtown in St. Paul. These forums approaching 15% of household engagement everyday in the largest forums, work because everyday local neighborhood association staff and leaders, elected officials and staff, park staff, neighborhood journalists, school and parent leaders, community organizations and most importantly everyday people decide that collaboration through shared community communication and dialogue makes their community stronger and increases its capacity to meet local challenges and define new opportunities for action.

Tell us about the community in which this collaboration took place:

50 words (400 characters).

The nominated collaborations take place across five neighborhoods in Minneapolis and St. Paul.
NHoods clustered in S. Mpls
Nhood, households, population, forum members, rough household participation

As our strongest and most successful forums within our 30+ forum network in the U.S., the United Kingdom, and New Zealand they are furhter leveraging a shared technology base and over a decade of lessons from our state and city-wide more political forums.

What issue(s) is your competition_entry related to?: *

Please choose up to 7 related terms from the categories below.

Who was involved in co-creating or implementing your collaboration (other organizations, leaders, community members, etc.)?:

The two key risks include taking our long-time Issues Forum model to the sub-city level and tackling social inclusion community voices in Cedar Riverside and Frogtown specifically with and intergrationist/diverse communities in one space approach.

While our city-wide Minneapolis and St. Paul Issues forums are large (1200 and 600 full members plus web visitors), as political forums they serve the niche political class reaching less tha one percent of households. Opening up our model tp what neighbors want to communicate was a calulated risk. Many neighborhood online forums are private (virtually gated communities) and some expressly prohibit political discussions. We opened up to "community life" exchange which includes a mix of community announcements, "Freecycle" style sharing among neighbors, Angie's List-style informal service providers recommendations, etc. While

Inclusion - Putnam says no, integration

How did this collaboration differ from the normal way of doing your work?:

100 word (800 characters)

How do you know your collaboration has been effective?:

100 word (800 characters)

What progress or impact has been made?:

150 words (1200 characters)

How would you go about continuing, expanding, or replicating this collaboration?: